Psychic Retreats

Psychic Retreats sets out a Kleinian account of patients who reach a stalemate in analysis, present as unreachable, and resist movement toward change. John Steiner traces how object relationships and defences combine into stable structures, pathological organisations, that the patient inhabits as a refuge from both persecutory and depressive anxiety. Within such a state, contact with the analyst and with reality is held at a safe distance, and the analysis settles into a stuck equilibrium.

Steiner builds from Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and from earlier work on narcissistic organisations, then extends the argument through close clinical reporting. He shows how these formations defend against unbearable guilt, how they bind split-off parts of the self, and how fragmentation can begin to reverse so that lost parts are recovered and reintegrated.

For the clinician, the value is a working vocabulary for the impasse: how to recognise a retreat, why interpretation of it meets resistance, and what changes when the patient risks emerging.